


In Dreaming

by AirgiodSLV



Series: 28 Lotrips AUs Challenge [22]
Category: The Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-11
Updated: 2006-05-11
Packaged: 2019-07-20 12:42:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16137479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AirgiodSLV/pseuds/AirgiodSLV
Summary: He knows it’s not real, but it’s the only reality he has, without the twitch-jerk of startled muscles to wake him up from the plunge. His muscles are slack, encased in a stasis chamber, hooked up to a computer that keeps him alive and aware. Aware of dreaming, at least.





	In Dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> AU #26, for [](https://kiltsandlollies.livejournal.com/profile)[kiltsandlollies](https://kiltsandlollies.livejournal.com/)

Orlando dreams of falling.

He knows it’s not real, but it’s the only reality he has, without the twitch-jerk of startled muscles to wake him up from the plunge. His muscles are slack, encased in a stasis chamber, hooked up to a computer that keeps him alive and aware. Aware of dreaming, at least.

Sometimes he feels as though he’ll fall forever.

The landscape around him blurs when he stops the fall, the surroundings not of his creation but something in his unconscious mind, coupled with the computer. He doesn’t know if this is his design; he’s never been a lucid dreamer. He’s never wondered too much about it…dreaming is for drifting, not pulling against the tide.

There are other people here, dotting the horizon. He only realizes when someone is looking at him because he himself has been looking back for several minutes without noticing. A man with hazel eyes and a snubbed nose, with sticky-out ears. The rest of him is blurred, missing definition by either Orlando’s lack of memory or the man’s own distorted sense of himself. He moves closer, and Orlando tries to pull this man from his own memory, reconstruct him so that the peach-toned shifting beneath his skin ceases.

“I’m Dominic,” the man says. “Dom.”

Orlando tries to remember if he knows a Dom. He’s never sure what’s real here and what isn’t, whether this is a creation of his imagination, or someone he passed in a supermarket once, maybe someone who smiled at him and he remembered their face – the snubbed nose, the too-large ears. Or maybe Dom came from another stasis chamber, hooked up to the same computer, and they’ve wandered into a shared dream.

“Orlando,” he says, his mouth moving and sound emerging while his thoughts drift, trying to place Dom in a remembered setting, a flower shop or an audition. Greenery crawls up around him, ivy climbing an invisible trellis until Orlando’s mused flower shop becomes real around them, or as real as anything can ever be anymore.

“What are you doing here?” Orlando asks, just to have a conversation with someone, even if it is only in his own head. He’s become lonely, listening to nothing but the rush of wind. He doesn’t remember much of anything besides falling.

“Car accident,” Dom says, and Orlando pictures him in a stasis chamber, imagines rows of them stretched out as far as the eye can see, all holding their precious patients hooked up to tubes and wires and computer banks and life support, waiting for medicine to catch up and save them.

“Terminal cancer,” Orlando says, and it’s funny, he hasn’t thought about that in a while. When he remembers, when he thinks of hospitals and pain and waiting to die, he thinks of before. Of falling.

“I’m looking for someone,” Dom says, his eyes distant, constant hazel in a shape-shifting face. “He was in the car with me when we crashed. I can’t find him.”

Orlando wants to know why Dom doesn’t just imagine him here, but he knows already. They don’t control the dream, they only experience it, follow it to its own ends. If Dom’s is a searching dream, he will be searching forever. Just like Orlando is always falling.

“I’m tired of dreaming,” Orlando says suddenly, and realizes that he means it, that this transitory universe is more constricting than liberating, that he yearns to be free of it. “I want to wake up.”

“I can’t wake up yet,” Dom says, his nose coming into focus briefly, his ears fading. “I have to find Bill.”

Orlando flexes as if he can push himself out of the dream, struggles with his mind over his flickering, insubstantial body to rise from stasis. It’s futile, he knows that he can’t even move a muscle in the real world by thrashing in here. If he screams in the dream, no one will hear him to wake him up.

“Do you think this is real?” he asks, searching Dom’s eyes for some trace of a memory, some sign that this isn’t just his brain creating fantasies to keep him occupied while his body slowly decays. Maybe he’s already dead. Maybe this is all there is to the afterlife, and maybe someone in the real world finally pulled the plug, and he never knew because he was trapped in dreaming.

“I don’t know,” Dom says, and then he simply fades away. Searching.

Orlando takes a deep breath and raises his arms, slowly out to his sides. He opens them again and he’s on a skyscraper, looking down on a city that stretches on forever. He leans forward and spreads his fingers, and he falls.


End file.
